SFR Has 140,000 Mobile TV Customers, Drama Most Popular Genre In Korea

The MIP conference had a panel on “When will mobile broadcasting take off”, but for some reason put the speaker from Korea last, so his time got cut short, according to The Guardian — not a good idea considering Sth Korea has the largest mobile broadcast TV industry…as the article says, attendees “were in serious danger of actually learning something” from the speaker, Hyoung Wook Kim, from mobile operator SBS. He gave some stats: “32.8 percent of users watched between 31 minutes and 1 hour of TV, but 25.7 percent watched 1-2 hours. Drama was the most popular genre accounting for 25.7% of viewing: sports was 16.7% and news 16.1%”. SBS is part of the free T-DMB service, and apparently each operator made about $20,000 profit from it last year, which doesn’t sound right. A story in November last year said that operators were making about $20K revenue a month, which was far short of the amount needed to break even. “Mr Kim isn’t worried: he predicts there will be ten million users by the end of the year: “And if we have that many users, we hope the advertising success will follow.”

French telco SFR was there, and said it has 140,000 subscribers on its 3G service offering 80 TV channels (3G isn’t broadcasting, but anyway…). Those subscribers are paying 12 euros (US$16.40) per month. SFR is upbeat about the potential growth, with 3 million 3G customers, although Solene Jaboulet from SFR said “We don’t think there is a market for free mobile TV…No TV channel has enough money to pay for this”, which goes against the Sth Korean T-DMB service. He could have been refering just to France, though. Graeme Ferguson (late of Vodafone) reckoned that a fair price for mobile broadcast TV is about 7 euros (US$9.54) per month.

Comments have been disabled for this post